Why is Mozilla harshing on Internet Explorer 9 (PC Mag had a good review of it the other day)? The company’s tech evangelist, Paul Rouget, said in a recent blog post that Internet Explorer 9 isn’t a “truly modern” browser, specifically calling out its implementation of HTML5. I don’t understand why the average person couldn’t use both (along with Chrome and Opera) to browse the Web as they see fit, but let’s hear Rouget out for a bit.

Rouget takes issue with IE9?s implementation of HTML5, saying Microsoft new’s browser (which I’ve used here and there since it went beta, and it’s fine for casual browsing, although, incidentally, I’m sill a Firefox user at heart) actually doesn’t support 99 percent of the HTML5 spec. Expanding that further, Rouget illustrates that IE9 supports a whopping 61 percent of Web standards. Compare that to Firefox’s 87 percent.

Probably most damning, and probably not too far off the mark, is the claim that IE9 is some two years late, specifically with its use of the video tag and and the canvas tag, to say nothing of SVG support.

For the average end-user most of this is probably academic; I doubt many non-Web developers out there knows what the canvas tag is used for. (I had to look it up, for the record.)

Again, I don’t see why there has to be such a war of words between proponents of this browser and that. They’re all pretty decent, right? Most of the CG staff has migrated to Chrome over the past few years (I think I’m the last Firefox holdout), and I’ve been testing the waters with IE9 for the past week or so when I’m on my PC.

At the very least competition between the different browsers should result in a better browsing experience for the “just plain folks” out there, no?